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Title: The Chair Ride
Author: Eunice Tietjens [
More Titles by Tietjens]
The coolies lift and strain;
My chair creaks rhythmically.
It is not yet morning and the live darkness pushes
about us, a greedy darkness that has swallowed
even the stars.
In all the world there is left only my chair, with the
tiny horn lantern before it.
There are also, it is true, the undersides of trees in
the lantern-light and the stony path that flows
past ceaselessly.
But these things flit and change.
Only I and the chair and the darkness are permanent.
We have been moving so since time was in the
womb.The seat of my chair is of wicker.
It is not unlike an invalid chair, and I, in it, am swaddled
like an invalid, wrapped in layer on layer
of coddling wool.
But there are no wheels to my chair. I ride on the
steady feet of four queued coolies.
The tramp of their lifted shoes is the rhythm of being,
throbbing in me as my own heart throbs.
Save for their feet the bearers are silent. They move
softly through the live darkness. But now and
again I am shifted skilfully from one shoulder to
the other.
The breath of the coolies is short.
They strain, and in spite of the cold I know they are
sweating.
It is wicked of course!
My five dollars ought not to buy life.
But it is all they understand;
And even I am not precisely comfortable.
The darkness is thinning a little.
On either side loom featureless black hills, their summits
sharp and ragged.
The Great Wall is somewhere hereabouts.
My chair creaks rhythmically.
In another year it will be day.
Ching-lung-chiao
[The end]
Eunice Tietjens's poem: Chair Ride
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